Re: Question about pre-meeting document posting deadlines for the IESG and the community

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 3/24/24 08:34, S Moonesamy wrote:

>> I don't think it's possible to reliably establish that the people 
>> showing interest in a WG's deliverables (for the present or future) 
>> are okay with a particular set of practices.   Even if a WG 
>> explicitly asks everyone on its mailing list for their consent to a 
>> change in the rules, new participants may join at any time, and it's 
>> not desirable to exclude or discourage new participants.
>
> There is a misunderstanding of the requirement/rule.  There are 
> requirements/rules which I cannot change, e.g. the Last-Call shall be 
> two weeks.
>
> Sometimes, a practice (sorry if it is not the correct word) is set by 
> agreement when the WG starts its work.  I found it useful as it allows 
> the WG to meet its target date for delivering the I-D to the AD.  For 
> what it is worth, I have been off by six months on a target date.  All 
> the RFCs which I shepherded were published in under three years.
>
> Over the years, I only received one complaint about the exclusion of 
> participants.  The person who filed the complaint had a point. 
> However, the point was something to do with IETF policy (which is 
> something which I could not change).
>
> The question which John asked for about documents to be discussed at a 
> meeting.  A person, irrespective of characteristics, who comes to the 
> meeting could protest if a rule was violated.
I have generally found that WG deadlines were often set without much 
appreciation for the difficulty in sorting out the technical problems.  
(No opinion about whether that was true for the documents you're 
referring to here.)
>> One of my big concerns about working groups, especially these days, 
>> is that there seems to be an increasing tendency for WGs to operate 
>> as closed clubs.  They can't stop new people from joining their 
>> mailing lists or their publicly announced meetings, but they can 
>> discourage participation from newcomers in various ways. Holding 
>> "interim" meetings (whether remote or in-person) without 
>> community-wide announcement in the usual means (e.g. ietf-announce) 
>> is certainly one way they can do that.   Having the chair or other 
>> designee object to any suggestion by an "outsider" is another way.  
>> It's absolutely NOT okay for a WG to operate in that way, even if 
>> some of the core participants think it's ok.
>
> As a comment on interim meetings, there is a decision by the IAB at: 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/iab/appeals/artifact/39
I have pretty strong opinions about interim meetings based on my own 
experience while on IESG, in which one WG in particular was holding 
interim meetings without broad public notice and only to the WG mailing 
list.   I found that this WG was hostile to outside input and that this 
was detrimental to the quality of their output.   I still find that WG's 
output to be of very low quality and to impair interoperability to this 
very day.   And I believe that the complexity of the spec that they 
produced discourages additional implementation which might improve 
reliability for users.

But on rereading IESG's current guidance, the only thing that really 
bugs me is that they permit frequent online interim meetings and that 
they only consider the current set of WG participants' interests, and 
not so much the interests of potential participants from outside the 
current WG.   I continue to believe that IETF needs to facilitate broad 
participation and needs to discourage working groups operating as 
effectively closed clubs, by whatever mechanisms they use (including 
making disparaging remarks about non-regular participants who show up at 
meetings, as I've seen done).   I don't think that the current set of WG 
participants are the only set of potential participants whose interests 
need to be considered in making scheduling decisions for a WG.  I also 
don't think that mere "discussion" of proposed meetings with the 
responsible AD is adequate, but I expect that in practice a WG is 
unlikely to meet over the AD's objection.

Keith